Dropping techspec and ipr-wg from this part of the thread
The current limit of 5 seems to be motivated by formatting constraints and
maybe by the notion that "vanity" publishing should be prevented. It is
not clear to me that these motivations have legal standing and
essentially, for practical purposes, force authors to give up their
rights. In the past, I know that for some drafts, this limit has been
extended when the AD made the right noises to the RFC editor, so it is not
universally observed.
People can tell me that I've been misleading WG chairs and editors, but what
I've been saying in the WG Leadership tutorial is that the 5-author limit
resulted from
- the practice of contacting authors at AUTH48, only to find out that more
authors increase the likelihood of job changes and/or e-mail bounces, plus
- several "dog-pile" author lists on drafts with a huge number of authors,
leading us to suspect that this was an effort to demonstrate "support" from
a large group of vendors ("so this should be a WG draft and WGLCed
immediately"), plus
- text formatting software that "broke" when the author list wouldn't fit on
one page because there were so many authors.
I hear Russ's concern about tracking IPR sources, but hope this doesn't get
conflated with author/editor tracking.
I'm the draft editor for the Softwires problem statement, which would have
seven authors (including me), except that we're trying to observe the
five-author guideline. Since this causes some heartburn, what I've been
thinking about proposing was
- if you have individual authors, you do both the front page and the author
section as we do them today
- if you have an editor, you list the editor on the front page, but not the
authors, and you list both editors and authors listed in the author section
(as we do today)
But I'm still thinking...
Thanks,
Spencer
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